IMPERIAL CHINESE CUISINE QUITE WORTHY OF THE NAME

Deja vu. An overused and much-abused term. But there's no other way to describe the feelings I had when discovering a Chinese restaurant on Hallandale Beach Boulevard a few nights ago.

Several years ago, I happened into another Chinese restaurant on the same street -- quite by chance. It was in the dining room of the Diplomat's tennis- golf complex, a nothing kind of place, small and with minimum staff. I had intended to have a salad or a sandwich, and was not at all prepared for what followed. It was some of the best Chinese food I have ever eaten in Florida. The chef and part of his family had come down from New York, from the highly rated Shun-Lee Dynasty, and found their way into that little house on the highway.

I thought of that chef when I was eating at a far more imposing place on the highway, a blockhouse that has been any number of restaurants in recent years. I thought of him because the food that I was served at Imperial Chinese Cuisine was superb, and I just happened on the place while driving to another destination.

The setting is modern functional, one large room with minimum decor, a bar up front and the kind of confusion along the back wall and kitchen entrance that a screen and some maintenance would clear up. It's the food that makes this place a winner.

First of all, everything was brought to my table roaring hot, obviously freshly removed from woks and not from warmers. The progression of dishes, rushed by a smiling staff from back room to front, reminded me of the time a few years ago when my daughter -- a talented chef when time permits -- was taking a course in Chinese cooking and at home was preparing the meals a few feet from where I was devouring them with great gusto.

As a matter of fact, not since those days of discovering just how good Chinese food can be have I been served an egg roll that was as hot and so freshly assembled in the kitchen. The skins were thin and separate and not fused together by too long a time out of the wok -- long as in hours if not days in those places that make up their egg rolls too far in advance.

The egg rolls were superb and so were the barbecue ribs with a terrific honey-garlic sauce. It was so good I searched at once over the menu to see if there were honey-garlic on other entrees. There was an $8.95 garlic-ginger sauce for shrimp stir-fried with shredded water chestnuts; a plain hot garlic sauce on the $6.25 eggplant Szechwan; a $7.50 beef dish with a hot, peppery sauce spiked with garlic; and a $6.75 pork preparation with garlic enlivening a brown sauce; but no honey-garlic.

No matter. By the time I gave up the search I had already come across the $14.50 Szechwan lobster. It's the most expensive entree on the menu, along with lobster Cantonese, lobster with ginger and scallions, and the $14.95 seafood wor bar; but as soon as it arrived at the table and I took the first taste, I knew it was worth every penny.

What a beautiful sight it was to behold the red cardinal of northern waters reposing so seductively on the platter. Head, claws and antenna at one end, the fantail at the other and in the center a reassembling of the various parts, each holding chunks of that lusciouly sweet, snow-white lobster meat. Not only is the chef at the Imperial Chinese a master of subtle flavoring and of timing to get his dishes to the table piping hot: He is a skilled surgeon as well.

Of course, a lobster covered with sauce -- Szechwan or Cantonese or whatever -- is not exactly something one can eat with true gusto in public. On board a boat off the coast of Maine, or alongside a pool in Florida, or maybe in the bathtub, of course. But in a restaurant surrounded by diners who might wonder about those people with such gloppy fingers?

I had no choice. I was not going to let the claws go unopened; not about to stop licking my fingers of very single morsel of that flavorful sauce, given a considerable amount of added oomph and crunch by a flurry of chopped scallions.

So I slopped and slurped my way through and was glad of everylast taste and every lick of the fingers. And I cannot wait to go back and work through rest of the menu, which is as long as Chinese restaurants like to make them, with all kinds of combination dinners.